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The Battle of Waterloo
Napoleon is defeated in Belgium
A British-led army under Wellington and a Prussian army under Blücher defeated Napoleon in Belgium. It ended his rule and the Napoleonic Wars.
Napoleon had escaped exile on Elba in early 1815 and regained power in France for a period known as the Hundred Days. He moved quickly into what is now Belgium to strike the allied armies before they could unite. On 16 June he fought the Prussians at Ligny while a detachment engaged Wellington's forces at Quatre Bras.
The main battle took place on 18 June near the village of Waterloo. Wellington's army was multinational, with British, Dutch, Belgian and German troops, so calling it simply British is misleading. It held a defensive ridge through repeated French assaults, and the arrival of Prussian troops on the French right flank in the evening decided the outcome.
Casualty figures differ between sources, but all agree that tens of thousands of men were killed or wounded in a single day. Napoleon abdicated again a few days later and was exiled to the remote island of Saint Helena, where he died in 1821.
The result closed more than two decades of near-continuous European war, and the peace settlement was shaped by the Congress of Vienna.
Wellington later described the result as a close-run thing, and historians still discuss how much credit belongs to the Prussian army compared with the allied force that held the ridge through the afternoon.